number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Edwin Harwood

articles

As Congress debates the shape of a new immigration act for the United States, one issue crucial to the debate has been surprisingly neglected: Whatever Congress and the administration decide is an appropriate immigration policy in the 1980s and beyond, can these decisions be enforced? Is it possible for the United States to implement and enforce any immigration policy, regardless of its content? We must raise this question because there is good evidence that our ability to enforce immigration policies has broken down. A narrow but crucial issue must be examined: Can the United States control the flow of immigration?

LOUISE MERIWETHER’S recent novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, deals with an adolescent Negro girl in Harlem at the depth of the Depression. Although the young heroine manages to fend off a variety of local predators—mostly whites who make sexual advances—she proves powerless to prevent the disintegration of her family, a process that becomes the dramatic anchor in the book’s plot. When her father stumbles hard against New York’s job-scarce labor market, her mother starts work as a domestic for a suburban housewife, at first for a few half-days a week, but, towards the end of the novel, on almost a full-time basis. She knows it wounds Dad’s pride, but the children must eat. What little Dad does manage to earn, by running numbers slips for the racketeers, he squanders on bets. The conclusion is foregone. Bitter at his wife’s taking relief and going to work as a domestic, he fades from the home and becomes “a street-corner man.”

SINCE the early 1960’s, the nation’s unemployment rate has dropped precipitously in most cities; yet youth unemployment remains high, especially among Negro teenagers. Why this should be so has been a puzzle to scholars and public officials. In Houston, where I studied the Neighborhood Youth Corps (NYC) over a one year period (between July, 1967 and August, 1968), the general unemployment rate had dropped to 2 per cent in the spring of 1968. A glance at the help-wanted ads of the metropolitan dailies revealed shortages of unskilled as well as of semiskilled workers. Yet youth unemployment seemed unaffected. The only possible explanation appeared to be that city youngsters could not adjust to the labor market because of (a) inadequate education, (b) lack of knowledge about jobs, of (c) the difficulty of getting to distant suburban businesses. One possibility we failed to contemplate: that many lower class youths, both white and black, are unemployed or subemployed for the same reasons that many middle-class college dropouts are: they can afford to be, and they prefer tobe.